


Other People

by executrix



Category: Blakes7
Genre: AU, M/M, Post-Gauda Prime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-09
Updated: 2011-06-09
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:28:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blake is still raising Hell, even post-mortem. Avon's latest business venture is not an unqualified success.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other People

_DEVIL: What rotten sins I've got to work with--I expect  
it's the wages._ (Bedazzled)

 _Heaven for climate, Hell for company_ (Proverb)

For a start, the weather wasn't what Blake expected, he hadn't dressed for perpetual cold rain. But then, neither had any of the people on the endless queues, waiting sheeplike for the buses that Blake (with his eagle-sharp vision) could see were loitering in packs of four, miles away.

He kept nearly spraining his ankle on the potholed streets (but it would have healed instantly, of course). There was no one with a red-hot trident to ask for directions. Eventually a fellow in a pork pie hat, chewing on a toothpick, sold him a "Styles of the Rich and Famous" map (Blake was bemused to see that money had somehow appeared in his pocket) and it was easy enough to find Avon's house. It was quite large, and so painfully vulgar that it must have constituted a torment in and of itself.

His first sight of Avon since--was a back view and a reflection in the Blue Screen of Death of a computer that had, as usual, crashed in the middle of something important that wasn't backed up. Avon cursed monotonously, and stabbed at a Reset button that was worn as the toe of St. Peter's statue. Then he saw Blake's reflection, reached his hand toward it, and at last was able to turn around.

"Blake. I can't tell you how glad I am that I can tell you how sorry I am to have hurt you at all, far less killed you. If it's any consolation, I may have suffered quite as much remorse acutely in the four minutes separating our deaths as chronically in the hundred and thirteen years, four months, nineteen days I've been here since."

"It can't be...I've only been there a few days, had a look around, played draughts with Gandhi, you know. Cursed you up and down, tried to figure out what the postmortem equivalent is of kicking your balls up between your ears, and simmered down a bit. And then I came to find you."

Avon gestured toward the dozen or so clocks set into the wall opposite, with a hand that bore a solid gold watch. "The concepts of time are rather different....there...and here. We have a very good idea of the passage of time."

"I didn't see any..." Blake said tactfully, with reference to e.g., flames that are not quenched and crimson chaps enforcing short-term uphill stone relocation.

"We...I...persuaded them to privatise. Because when you get right down to it, we wouldn't be here if it weren't for what we can't change." Avon felt the Privation of Grace very keenly, sometimes he thought he was the only person who got the point of the place at all, but then it wasn't the first time he had ever felt that way.

The communicator went off. "Dark Satanic Mills," Avon answered, and Blake couldn't follow most of the conversation except that it sounded unpleasant. Avon crashed down the receiver. "Limited natural resources--the place was pretty well mined out when I got here, under the previous regime--endless labor troubles--there's not much in the way of sanctions you can apply to someone who's already dead and damned--it took awhile to re-introduce the concept of money, and of course it's always a struggle getting hard currency for imports. The first thing I thought of was rounding up the herds of wild naugas, so many men still have those Wild West fantasies, you know. It helped a bit, but that put us in the perpetual position of a Third World economy...."

Blake thought that, what with the living world and Heaven, that actually expressed it pretty well.

"...but fortunately things have picked up a bit. You wouldn't think it would be worth the money, but once we could prove to them that we'd take them back, we've done rather well with sex tourism. You might want to drop by Vila's House of a Thousand Virgins while you're in town--it's quite the tourist attraction, coaches outside the door at all hours. No, not to partake. Purely to say hello to him. I know he's missed you."

Avon snapped his fingers, lit a cigarette off his thumbnail, and refrained from offering the pack to Blake. The cigarettes here were even more addictive than Terrestrial ones. A lot like the sex, actually. You couldn't wait until the next one, because you couldn't help hoping that it was going to bridge the short gap to actually being pleasurable even though you had already determined experimentally that it would do nothing of the kind.

"I wasn't there long enough--well, it didn't seem like it--but I don't know, there was a lot happening but perhaps it was a bit bland," Blake said.

"Well, you won't find much joie de mourir here. I was rather looking forward to coming here, you know. Lots of clever people. But you wouldn't want to hold your breath--well, if you were breathing in the first place--waiting for them to get off their arses. Nobody ever finishes anything, they just sit around the bars talking about what marvelous things they're going to do. It drives me mad."

"I expect we got all the serious people and you got the frivolous ones."

"Keep your head down," Avon said, "In case Mum sees you're here and hales you over for a casserole." (He made a note--on a piece of paper, no point in tempting the fates by trying to use the computer--to add another case of tinned pineapple chunks to the import order.) "But you're all right with Travis, assuming there was anything he could do to you anyway, he's decided that we'd all be dead by this time anyway so why take on about it."

Blake heard the sliding glass door from the patio open. "Hon?" A young man, grapefruit-like biceps, extensive Celtic tattoos, platinum hair, sunbed tan, and all walked into the room. All (including the pierced nipple) was available for inspection, since he was lightly clad in a papaya-toned Speedo packed like a flat-rate Global Priority Mail envelope.

Even without occult powers, Blake could see it all in a flash. The boy (named Rod, inevitably) had been assigned to Avon by the former management, much as the KGB had provided Kim Philby with companionship. He knew that Rod believed in horoscopes (it was probably projection on Blake's part to visualize him moving his lips when he read them, though) and that they had a bichon frise that shed a fuck of a lot for a dead dog.

"Who's this and what's he doing here?"

"My ex," Avon said. "He's come for an apology."

"Oh, well, he'll never get that from you, now will he? So just tell him to sod off."

"He's had it already. First thing. And I'll do nothing of the kind."

There was a limp roar from outside, like an extremely enervated lion. "You picked a good day for it," Avon said, standing up and brushing dog hair where it clung to the back of his trousers. "Come on." He and Blake stood close together, looking through the sliding glass patio doors, past the lawn flamingos and garden gnomes.

About a hundred yards away, there was a mighty mountain range of rugged granite. As the crowd watched (or couldn't be bothered to), a tiny sparrow struggled to fly all the way up to the top. When it reached its goal, it brushed one wing against the highest peak, and flew off. The sparrow came back every hundred years, and when the mountain range was gone, then presumably it would be Make it Another Salvation, Please, and Someone Else would be standing the round.

The crowd gave another roar, diminuendo. Its more energetic members made a note in their diaries for a hundred years hence, but most of them just stood there for a while, and then drifted away.

"I forgive you," Blake said. "I didn't at first but I got over it. But I need to know why."

"Because I thought that it was all of a piece with everything else in my life. Because I was sick of being laughed at. Because I wanted to punish you for not being who I loved so much. Because either you had gone over to the other side, or it was another goddamn stupid stunt like that business after Gan died. Because you went away and left me without a word and if you thought you could live without me, I was going to prove you wrong."

"That's what I couldn't sort out by myself, what I had to ask you directly. How could you think any of that, when we loved each other so much?"

"We loved at each other. Past each other, like a couple of kids dueling in a schools production of Macbeth."

Blake, wondering if they still had bodies (oh, yes, he discovered instantly) put his arms around Avon. "I'm not ashamed to admit that I need you," Blake said.

"Well, I am."

At last, Blake knew what it was like to soar in bliss in the empyrean. And for Avon, it was even closer to the asymptote of actual enjoyment than any of his not-infrequent post-mortem sexual experiences. Blake felt better afterwards. Avon felt worse. That is what fiction means.

Avon, putting his clothes back on, knew he was never going to hear the end of it from Rod.

"I'm sorry that you suffered so much. If I'd known, I would have stopped it. Well, after the first bit anyway, when I got my head around it."

"You know, I did and I didn't and now I've got lots of money, I get laid a lot, and although there has been no conspicuous development in my leadership skills, I am de facto in charge of lots of strip mines and strip clubs. It hardly matches finding Rome a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble, but I can pride myself on having made a difference. (Well, I could always pride myself on any fucking thing, that's part of how I got here.) Perhaps you might ask Tarrant if that constitutes success."

"I came to--help you," Blake said, because "rescue" sounded impossibly silly. Avon smiled with one corner of his mouth, and took a "Get Out of Jail Free" card out of his jacket.

"Don't you think I belong here?" he asked. "Pride, envy, anger..."

Blake thought he had a point there. "I wouldn't call you slothful, though."

"Blake, I popped my girlfriend and then I went back for the bookend. Don't you think I'd lower the tone of the place a bit? And when it comes to repentance, the only thing I'm sorry for is hurting you. And having terrible taste in accomplices, which is a purely pragmatic view with no smack of theology about it."

"Come with me," Blake said. "I'll sort anyone who tries to stop you. And you needn't worry about anyone asking you anything with 'serviam' in it, they won't."

"I can't. Given what I am, I did what I did. I don't belong there. I'll drop over to see you when the sparrow comes back." Avon said. "Same time, next century. Goodbye, my angel."

CODA

Blake gave him eleven years (on Avon's time schedule--it was a couple of weeks, in Blake's) to think it over and realize that he'd been a big drama queen (no surprise there)--"Goodbye, my angel" my arse!--and acted like a fool. That was, Blake judged, about the right amount of time in the context of the rest of eternity. Anyway, it had been bloody hard to get the season tickets for the Shakespeare in the Park series and Blake didn't want to waste them. The new stuff wasn't a patch on the old, but occasionally the old boy came out with a bit worth seeing.

Then Blake materialized Rod, and set out his proposition.

"'My way or highway' I suppose you're saying?" Rod said sulkily.

"You got that right, mate." Blake said. The doorbell rang. "And here's your new friend now." Blake had always liked Jeremy, who was balding, pudgy, bespectacled, extremely kind, and had spent his entire Earthly life mooning over boys who wouldn't give him the time of day.

Jeremy took one look at Rod, collapsed to his knees, and kissed Blake's hand, to his considerable embarrassment. "I knew it...when I read my horoscope today [Blake's skepticism about astrology as a predictive tool increased exponentially when it came to dead people] it said something wonderful was going to happen..."

"Do you like dogs?" Rod asked.

"Adore 'em...."

"Just wait till you meet Cookie..." (which didn't take long, because Blake materialized her on the spot). Rod crouched down to hug Cookie, and Jeremy was groveling on the rug already, giving Blake the opportunity to move along.

This time, it was still raining but the bus queues were noticeably shorter, and most of the people in them had macintoshes and umbrellas, although Blake had his suspicions about who had pocketed the licensing fees for all the logos.

In the interim, Avon had managed to nudge his computer's average uptime to 19 minutes (he eternally ordered replacement parts but they never arrived, and nothing he fabricated would work), and by a slow process of accommodation he'd also got better about saving his work.

"I said I'd come to you," Avon said, wiping the transfiguration off his face. "And in...oh, about eighty-nine years."

"I thought about it, and I decided that you forfeited the right to make the rules. If not with the first shot, certainly by the third. Oh, and about Rod...he's been kicked upstairs. And you're half right about this place. We could make something of it."

 _If I can't shake the heavens themselves, I'll raise hell._


End file.
